Havel was a hero who didn’t disappoint, says Art for Amnesty’s Bill Shipsey

This Thursday a bust of Václav Havel will be unveiled at
Ireland’s Dáil (Parliament), making him the first non-Irishman to be
recognised in this way. The man behind the move is barrister Bill Shipsey.
The founder of Art for Amnesty, he also raised funding for a tapestry in
the late Czech president’s honour at the then freshly renamed Václav
Havel Airport Prague and brought the first Havel’s Place memorial in
Europe to Dublin’s St. Patrick’s Park.

“The work at that stage was the first time Havel went to prison, when he
attended the trial of the Plastic People of the Universe and was adopted
by
Amnesty International as a prisoner of conscience. He was one of the
people
my group worked on, trying to secure his release.”

What form did that take? Was it letter writing?

“Letter writing, yes.”

Would the communist authorities in Czechoslovakia have reacted in any
way?
Or did you get any feedback in any sense from Prague?

“Not from the authorities. But that was not uncommon in terms of the
letters that we wrote.

“But we knew from the prisoners’ families – sometimes you wrote to
the prison authorities, sometimes you wrote to the authorities – that it
was enormously important to the families that people outside their own
country were taking notice.

“Also it’s not just an end in itself. Amnesty is successful. We know
that prisoners have been released. We also know that by writing letters it
makes it much more difficult for governments to act with impunity. They
can’t just forget about that prisoner.

“When I read about the wonderful poets under Stalin, people like Marina
Tsvetayeva, who spent a lot of time in Prague, or Osip Mandelstam, who was
imprisoned and sent to the Gulags, they would have benefited so much from
an organisation like Amnesty International in the 1930s.

“From somebody to say to the Soviet government, or whatever government,
that were imprisoning prisoners of conscience, We know they’re there, we
care about them, you’ve got to respect their rights.”

How was it for you meeting Mr. Havel all those years later? I guess
as
your case he must have been a kind of abstract figure, on paper, but then
you met the man for real.

Václav Havel, photo: Tomáš Vodňanský
“That was in 2003. In 2003 I founded Art for Amnesty. I founded it to
allow artists to give voice to their support for Amnesty International.
One
of the ideas I had initially was that Art for Amnesty should be
celebratory.

“Because a lot of the work of Amnesty International is hard and
depressing. I wanted to create a space for celebration within Amnesty
International, and that’s why I came up with the idea to have the
Ambassador of Conscience Award.

“And in my mind’s eye when I was thinking of the award there was only
one person I was thinking of and that was Václav Havel.”

Why Havel?

“I have a number of heroes in my own pantheon of gods – people like
Ghandi, Martin Luther King – but for me Havel actually feels closer to
my
ideal. Havel is the person I would like to be on my best day.

“He was not only courageous in the face of oppression and being sent to
prison but he was articulate. He was a great writer, a great thinker, and
he was able to articulate the importance of human rights and what they
mean
in a very tangible way.

“I think his essay The Power of the Powerless is probably the greatest
essay or text on human rights that has ever been written.

“It’s the greatest manifestation of somebody standing up against
seemingly insuperable powers but dismantling them by the power of the pen
and the power of words.”

So how was it then when you actually met?

“Very often in life your heroes don’t match up to your expectations.
You tend to idealise people in your mind. But in the case of Havel he was
greater than I had imagined.

“We had difficulty in communicating in the sense that I don’t speak
Czech. His English was I think better than he let on, but he wasn’t
comfortable in English. But that actually didn’t matter. Through the
limited English that he had and through gesture [we communicated].

“And the aura of goodness and humility around the man was something
exceptional. We met in July 2003 – it coincided with one of the Rolling
Stones’ concerts, in Letná Park that day – and then in November 2003
he flew to Dublin to accept the award from the hand of Seamus Heaney.”

Is it the case that Heaney had inspired the award in the first
place?

Seamus Heaney, photo: Public Domain
“Heaney wrote a poem at our request 30 years ago in 1985, 10 years
before he won the Nobel Prize for literature, in 1985. He initially said
no
and then said yes to writing a poem.

“Poets don’t write to order and Heaney didn’t either, but he wrote
this marvelous poem called The Republic of Conscience in which he imagined
this, I suppose Utopian, republic.

“Towards the end he described this republic with the words: Their
embassies, he said, were everywhere but operated independently, and no
ambassador would ever be relieved.

"So I had the idea that we would create this award within Amnesty
International called the Ambassador of Conscience and in a sense they
never
got relieved – they were ambassadors for life.”

Tell us about when Havel came to Dublin to accept the prize – how
did
that go?

“The first night he arrived it was late in the evening. We picked him up
from the airport. Dagmar, who was travelling with him, was tired and he
dropped her at the hotel. Then the first thing we did was to go to the U2
studio.

“At that time Bono and Edge were recording what was to become the
Vertigo album. Bono had lost his father about a year before that and he
had
written a song called Sometimes You Can’t Make it on Your Own – and he
and Edge played it for Havel.

“Guinness was produced somewhere in the U2 studio and then we went on to
a late-night bar. I remember being a little bit worried about 3 o’clock
that we were still in this bar which should have closed by then.

“I didn’t want the former president of Czechoslovakia and the Czech
Republic to be arrested on my watch. But somehow we managed to get out of
the pub and home safely.”

What kind of communication was there between Havel and U2? Was he a
U2
fan? Were they fans of his?

“Bono and Edge were huge, huge fans. Bono tells a lovely story that once
he went to a Forum 2000 meeting and for some reason, through some mix-up,
he wasn’t on the official list or wasn’t at the official table.

“But what President Havel did was he came in arm in arm with Bono and
made sure that he got seated at the table. And Bono never forget that
kind,
thoughtful gesture. Bono and Edge were hugely respectful of him and huge
admirers of him.

'Flying Man' by Peter Sís, photo: Czech Television
“Then when he died in December 2012 and my friend Peter Sís did this
beautiful drawing called Flying Man, which appeared in Hospodářské
noviny, I had the idea that we honour him with a tapestry, which had a
dedication ceremony a year later in 2013. And the first two people to step
up to the plate to want to fund that were Bono and Edge.”

How did you become aware of that drawing by Peter Sís? And what was
the
whole process of having the tapestry made?

“But Peter Sís has been my friend and a friend of Amnesty International
for 10 or 12 years. At that time a campaign started to rename Prague
Airport in Václav Havel’s honour and it was spectacularly successful in
that he died in December and by March the government had decided to rename
it.

“Then I had the idea, because Louis le Brocquy, an Irish artist and
Amnesty International supporter had beautiful tapestries made in Aubusson,
which was where Picasso’s painting Guernica was also made into a
tapestry…

“And I thought, One of the ways to keep pressure on the government so
they wouldn’t change their position – because decisions can be changed
– was to tell them that we were going to honour them with this giant
tapestry.

“This is almost 100,000 dollars worth of art. I felt if we committed to
doing that it might make it a little more difficult for them to change
their minds.”

Tell us about your involvement with the series of Havel’s Places.
The
first one in Europe was unveiled in Dublin.

“It was through Peter Sís. One of his classmates was Havel’s
architect Bořek Šípek – a wonderful glass designer and wonderful
artist – and Bořek came up with the idea in connection with Human
Rights
Day in 2014 of creating a public art installation in the form of two
chairs
around a table with a Linden tree growing through the middle.

“What he wanted to do was to create a space for democratic dialogue. The
seats are at right angles so and the idea is you sit down and have a
discussion with whoever you want. They are symbolic.

"With my friend [Oisín Quinn], who was the Lord Mayor at the time,
we jumped at the opportunity. It was dedicated by the Lord Mayor and Karel
Schwarzenberg on Human Rights Day in 2013.

“Since then there have been 10. I’m not saying we’re responsible for
all of them – some have been installed by the Václav Havel Library in
the Czech Republic – but we, meaning Art for Amnesty and the Václav
Havel Library, have been jointly responsible for dedicating one in
Barcelona, one in Venice and one in the Hague. And there are many more
planned.”

You’re about to unveil a bust of Václav Havel at the Irish
parliament,
the Dáil. But what’s the connection between Havel and Ireland? If
he’s
the only non-Irishman honoured in this way, why him?

“He’s the first. And I suppose what is special about Havel is that the
European Union that we have today we wouldn’t have without him.

“It’s very hard to say what the straw was that broke the camel’s
back of communism and caused the break-up of the Soviet bloc. But I think
Havel had a greater influence in the restoration of freedom across Europe
than any other single person.

“There’s not a direct connection but Seamus Heaney, who was a revered
poet here, everybody knew the strong feeling he had for Václav Havel. He
was our last Nobel literature laureate.

“The one before that, in 1969, was Samuel Beckett. Beckett wrote 17
plays, including very famous ones like Endgame and Waiting for Godot.

"But a small and lesser-known play of his was called Catastrophe and
he dedicated that in 1982 at the time of the Avignon Festival to Václav
Havel, who was in prison at that time. That’s the only play of his that
was dedicated to someone.

“So I think when it was pointed out to our parliamentarians that the
literary gods of Ireland, Beckett and Heaney, thought so highly of Havel
that had an impact.

“Of course lots of our politicians knew Havel as the president of the
Czech Republic and would have known him as a famous dissident in the 1970s
and 80s, so there was really no controversy about it and no debate about
it.

"It just seemed like the right thing to do. As you say he becomes the
first non-Irish person to be so honoured.

Bořek Šípek, photo: Lenka Kabrhelová
“There’s a very clear Czech connection in that the bronze statue was
forged in the Czech Republic and designed by Marie Šeborová. She won a
competition among 20 sculptors. Thankfully we will get more than one bust
of the mould.

“The Irish one is being dedicated on June 18, but two weeks ago [in
early May] I carried one with me to Mexico and it was dedicated in the
Tlatelolco Cultural Centre at the National Autonomous University of
Mexico.

"There are plans for two more but they’re not across the line yet
– you’ll have to watch this space to find out about those ones. Havel
will be appearing across Europe.”

In broader terms do you feel there’s any connection between Czech
and
Irish people? Is there any reason they might get on better than some other
nations perhaps?

“I suppose it should be left to historians and anthropologists to answer
that, but I would suspect the Czechs are the lost tribe of the Celts. I
certainly feel a community when I visit Prague. I don’t feel I’m far
from home.”

Tell us about your experiences in Prague – are you there often?
What
kind of things do you do when you’re there?

“Not often enough. But it’s probably the city that I’ve visited most
in the last number of years and I’ve mentioned friends. Bořek Šípek.
Peter Sís, who doesn’t live there but still has a home there.

"It’s a hard thing to put your finger on, but when I land there I
feel very comfortable, I feel very happy there.

“Prague is full of history, it’s full of culture, and it’s also
probably the only place that has more gory and gruesome statues than
Ireland, so perhaps there are similarities between Ireland and the Czech
Republic in terms of our troubled pasts.”